


the castle, the keeper

by Violetwilson



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gothic, Hades and Persephone, and your new housemate is like really into sitting on your lap, ben just wants to read, is a vow of celibacy still in effect if the order you swore it to is gone, rey just wants to fight, someone get rey some goddamn shoes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 21:37:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18157346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violetwilson/pseuds/Violetwilson
Summary: Ben Solo is the Keeper of Death, Master of Dreams, and the anointed Ruler of All that Dies.Rey of Jakku is very, very lost.---------------------------He sits forward in the chair. “Death isn’t a reversible situation.”“Ah,” she says, crawling to the end of the bed. “But I’m not dead. Not really.”Ben shakes his head. “What matters is that you’re here. In death's kingdom. Death isn't based on mere corporeal limitations, and anyway you can’t just leave. That's the whole point.”“Then I need to speak with him,” she says, an edge to her voice.“With who?”“The keeper. The king of the dead.”Ben blinks. He'd all but forgotten the title.[a loose retelling of Hades & Persephone]





	1. Arrival

At some point in the far distant past, the living outnumbered the dead.

That must have been eons ago, Rey thinks. Well before recorded history. Not that she knows much about that, but she’s caught glimpses of another time, another place, in her mind’s eye when she’s working. In idle moments she meditates in a rough, unstudied way. The way that breathing will match pace with hurried steps, or a drum will beat in time with a heartbeat, Rey feels herself slipping sometimes into a great Other that can be nothing else but the Living Force.

It feels like drifting on a great cosmic sea, which is far more pleasant than rubbing sand out of her eyes in the great wreck of a star destroyer, hiding from the wrath of Ri’ia buffeting sand against the hull outside. The thing they don’t tell you about sandstorms is that, if you have shelter that will keep you alive, they’re boring.

So Rey sits in a her meditation pose, thinking idly of death. She hadn’t really intended to contemplate these mysteries, her legs crossed underneath her, her hands at her sides, palms up to the sky of metal protecting her from the sandstorm beyond. But mysteries, being what they are, invite contemplation, and she chews on her thoughts the way she would a piece of tough meat.

How many people have ever died? Where do those souls go? Are the stories true? Would her parents be there? Would they recognize her?

The Force, normally a faint buzz in the back of her mind, overtakes her, enervating and soft. The gritty floor underneath her falls away. The sound of endless particles of sand dashing against the hulk of the star destroyer  _ Dauntless _ fades away. It  _ all _ fades away, until she is standing barefoot a few miles above the surface of Jakku, her toes gently brushing a nearby star cluster and her hair tangling in a galaxy a few systems off.

Floating like this, she wonders if it would be possible to fly to the world of the dead. If anyone would even  _ want _ to. Hungry, poor, and dirty as she is, Rey can’t imagine that there would be much there to tempt her. They say the dead feed on air, that their bodies are made of stardust, that they slip away into the Great Unknowing and are lost forever.

A picture forms in her mind the way a cloud takes shape on the horizon. Dimly, she makes out the color of it first. Dark black. Basalt, she thinks, which is a word that had no meaning for her until just now. A second new word appears, fully formed on her tongue.

“Castle,” she breathes, staring at the faint suggestion of edges blocking against the dim sky, the sparkling darkness of a world just out of reach.

Her mistake, of course, is in concentrating on it. If it weren’t for the hunger and the sandstorm, she would remember that to study something is to bring it to you, that her connection to the Force has only ever brought her strangeness.

But she is hungry, and she is drifting light years away from her physical body on a tide too great to resist. Not that she tries, as the structure- the  _ castle _ \- makes its way into her field of vision. It isn’t so large, really. Not compared to a star destroyer. But the nothingness, the absolute abyss of the world around it makes the whole thing look larger than life. It sweeps up to the stars, borne up on a billowing cloud. Or perhaps a storm. There is no other word to describe it but looming.

And then she is no longer swimming, she is being pulled on the drift of her thoughts, out of the stars brushing her fingers, into the orbit of the great castle swelling in her mind’s eye.

It’s not panic she feels, but a strange, lurching awareness that she has flown too close to the void. Dove too deep. And someone, somewhere, reaches out with a hand too firm to be astral, too strong to be a vision, and  _ holds. _

__

He’s reading when he senses her. A traveler. Not unusual around these parts, but none ever venture this close. Nothing has ever survived.

And the being, the  _ woman _ orbiting this mind yet lives. That much is clear. A comet of a creature, an arrival so loud and vivid it should be heralded with music and banners. She is thunderously loud, a cosmic exclamation mark that sends him to his feet, yet he hears no noise. He crosses to the window, pushes the curtains back, and leans out to see-

Nothing. Stars. Moons. Darkness. The same as it has always been, will always be, and he is alone, and he is a fool who is going crazy after too much time spent in solitude-

“Oh,” says a voice. 

The first new voice here since his own arrival. That noise, that ringing voice-

She is sitting delicately in his bed, her eyes blinking. Slight. Wiry. Bright-eyed, as though just waking up from a strange dream.

“Hello,” he says, hardly recognizing his own voice. It seems to thunder in the stone room, but she doesn’t flinch, just stares at him, illuminated by the roaring fire in the hearth and the watery gray light from the window. 

“I think I’m lost,” she says, shifting in his bed. Almost apologetic. “I went a bit too far.”

“I should say so,” he says, recovering the use of his limbs. Deciding that she is no threat, he leans against the windowsill. Keeping himself the just faintly backlit. She needn’t be exposed to the awful truth that must be plain on his face. Not yet. It needn’t degenerate so quickly. 

“It’s just, I was thinking about the stars, you know,” she says, gesturing at the window, the interminable fog.  “And I was wondering where- whether the stories are true. And then I saw-”

She cuts off, her eyes drifting to the window. 

Youngish, but grown. Wide eyes. A kind of creaturish ease. Pretty. None of this is real for her; he can tell by the look in her eyes. This place feels surreal to the uninitiated, especially those unused to astral travel. 

She isn’t afraid of him. Not yet. 

He speaks again, surprising himself further.

“Normally, the only people to see the Black Castle are the ones at the end of their lives.”

“Well, I’m not dead,” she corrects. “Just lost.”

“As you say,” he agrees. “Otherwise you could not have come here. You would have gone straight to the plains. But if you’re in the castle, you must be alive somewhere. Where is your body?”

“Jakku. So I guess you’re not dead either.”

His eyes flick down the smooth length of her, all compressed strength and roving assessment.

“Decidedly not.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

Unease, prickly and sharp, flares in his chest.

“It shouldn’t be. You’re in the world of the dead.”

“I did realize that,” she says, a little tartly. 

No longer afraid of scaring her, he stands to his full height and moves to the chaise by the fire. Best he explain this now, while she’s calm. Her eyes follow him.

“Then you should know about the nature of death. It isn’t a reversible situation.”

“Ah,” she says, crawling to the end of the bed. “But I’m not dead.”

Ben shakes his head. “You’re  _ here _ . Death does not discriminate based on mere corporeal limitations. You can’t just leave.”

“Surely you could speak to him,” she says, an edge to her voice. 

“Him?”

“The keeper. The king of the dead.”

Ben blinks. It’s been so long since he’s heard himself spoken to that he nearly forgot the damn title, lapsed though it is. There’s a trusting faith in her eyes, a certainty that with a few well targeted words, her circumstances could be overturned. Her jaw clenches, and he amends his previous thought. She’d be as like to attack him as speak to him.

“You’re- you’re mistaken,” he manages.

Her bare feet make next to no noise as they hit the stone floor. She walks like someone trying not to startle a wild animal, all bent knees and limber movements. Whoever she is, she is a hunter. Drawing close, she peers up at him, freckled face illuminated by the fire. A golden gaze, a direct brow, a set jaw.

Ben suspects that, if she asked, the object of her hunt would lay down at her feet in willing prostration. Equally, he doubts she is the sort of woman to ask.

“I am the keeper,” he says.

Those golden eyes stare. “Truly?”

“In the flesh.”

One hand, pink and warm and living, reaches out to touch him. Through concerted effort, he does not tense or flinch, but submits to her gentle touch as her hand connects with his arm.

“You’re… you’re not a god.”

“No.”

“You’re a man.”

Her touch turns searching, gently running down his skin. She can have no idea that this is the first contact with another living being he’s had in nearly a decade. That her curious, innocent fingers are giving his body sensations he’d spent years in his uncle’s temple trying to stifle. One brush of her fingernail on his forearm drowns out years of meditation.

“Yes.”

It hisses out. 

He will master himself, of course. But not now, while she watches him with such interest. Not here, where he is once again a man.

“Immortal?” she murmurs. That fingernail digs a little harder, and he feels the bite of it down to his very toes. And of course, immortal or otherwise, he is weak. His hand comes up, grips hers, pulls those fingers off his skin before he is burned alive by the feeling of it.

“No. And neither are you, in your current state.”

How hoarse is his voice? How long since he’d spoken with honestly, as his own self, to anyone?

“I need to get back to my body.”

“Perhaps you could retrace your steps,” he says, since she apparently needs to figure out the futility of her efforts for herself. “How did you even make it this far?”

“I was acting on instinct,” she says, her eyes glazing over. “I was hungry. Waiting out a storm. Nothing better to do, nothing to scavenge.”

Something clicks. “You mean to tell me you’re, what, a scavenger?”

She shrugs. “Depends on your point of view. You could just as easily call me a thief.”

“Have you studied the ways of the Force?”

“Of course not. Where would I have learned that?”

The scorn in her voice heavily implies an unsaid,  _ ‘Moreover, why would I?’ _

“You projected here... on instinct?”

It’s been a long time since he’s felt disbelief.

The woman shrugs. “It’s a pastime.”

If things had been different, she wouldn’t have slipped so thoroughly through the cracks. If his grandfather had been alive, if he had been good, this girl would have been raised in a temple somewhere, trained to manage her passions to serve the greater good. Instead, she is a wiry, roving creature with Force abilities beyond even her own comprehension. A creature of-  _ what had she called it- _ of instinct, who carried herself star systems away without even trying.

If he’d been a young man, he could’ve hated her for her innate ability. For her strength. But as things are, he only watches it. Curious and careful. Aware of his own physical response to her. Aware of the way she smells and tilts her head and looks up at him with that cagey, sensory curiosity.

“You’ve never thought about how unusual that is?” he murmurs.

She gives him a smile, unexpectedly playful. “No time. And anyway, what’s that even mean, coming from you? Keeper of the dead, living here all alone?”

She eyes the dark drapes, the bare mantel, the books lining the walls.

“I am solitary. It is a part of my order.”

“Who ordered you to do that?”

There’s a look in her eyes, like she senses the presence of a higher authority who deserves her ire more than he does.

“He’s dead,” he says flatly. And regrets it. Maybe he isn’t a kind man, after all.

But she looks pleased. “Well, that’s a relief. Now you can do what you like.”

He’s not sure how to respond to that, but she doesn’t seem to expect a reply. Walking past him, she crosses to the open window and looks out over the rolling mists. Her hair, braided loosely at her back, reaches down between her collarbones, which are swathed in loose, coarse fabric.

“Storm’s coming,” she says to the wind. One foot twists against the floor, mobile and agitated. The other holds her up on her toes, a dancer in a thief’s garments. Glancing over one shoulder, she says, “I should go.”

Ben clenches a fist. “As I’ve said, you can’t simply leave.”

Maddeningly, she appears unfazed. “Well, I got in. Was that supposed to happen?”

“Everyone comes here.”

She points a finger, turning around and leaning casually against the window. “But not like I did. You said so yourself. If I were dead, I’d be out there.”

He has no answer for that. “What is your name?”

“Rey. You?”

“Ben.”

She repeats it.  _ Ben.  _ He shudders.

“Yes,” he agrees. “You need to leave. I will help you.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! This chapter is entirely dedicated to [Casey,](https://twitter.com/caseydoesfandom/) my sweet friend. 
> 
> I'd love to have you join me on [my Tumblr](https://violetwilson.tumblr.com/) and [my Twitter](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for fun chats and dumb memes! 
> 
> If you liked this story, I'd really appreciate a kudos and a comment! It's the only way I get paid.


	2. Impact

Her first matter of business is the same as ever: food.

Turning from the window, from that great, frothing expanse of mist, she looks back at him, and she finds him good to look at.

Strong, tall, broad. The sort of man who could make a fortune in scrap if he weren’t a madman. And there’s something other about him, some quality of remove, a cool distinction covering up that huge body of his. He has a body built for violence, a mouth built for sweet nothings.

“You’re not what I was expecting,” she says.

“Well,” he sighs, getting to his feet. “I wasn’t expecting you either. I suppose you’re hungry.”

He has shoulders that could carry her. If she were injured, he could lift her up, carry her to safety.

“Ravenous.”

“Astral travel does that. Come,” he says, turning from the room. “I’ll feed you.”

He doesn’t look back at her, just strides from the room. Rey thinks, in an abstract way, that if he asked her to, she would lay with him gladly.

Following behind, she trails down a narrow stone corridor lined with inset light panels, his black pants making soft _shhh_ _shh_ noises on the dark stone with his every step.

“Were there more of you?” Rey wonders, following behind him.

In between the wall lights are pools of inky blackness, and the man seems to flick in and out of existence.

“There was a whole council of keepers,” he says, his voice removed and distant. It echoes against the stone walls.

“But they’re dead now,” Rey guesses. They pass a window, open to the sky outside and letting in watery gray light. Her fingers trail along the stone. Smooth rock under her touch, and then nothing, just air, and then stone again. The keeper doesn’t turn.

“They have become one with the Force.”

“Can you speak to them? Can you find them on the plains?”

At this, he pauses, turning back to her with his mouth in a firm line.

“Who is it you’re about to ask for?”

Rey balks, startled. Analyzing her feelings, she realizes that’s he’s right.

“My parents.”

“I can’t help you,” is all he says, turning back to the long hallway with its pools of light and void.

Not surprised, Rey simply follows, watching the way he moves. Not gracefully, but not in a lurching way either. It’s hard to describe. Not a prowl, but more of a pace. Like he has walked this path many times looking for something, but he has never quite found it. And then, quite suddenly, the hallway empties into a vast, empty hall. Tapestried and dark, it is a few stories tall at least, an iron chandelier swaying unlit. Ben makes for the stairs, his tread unceasing, his eyes fixed on his destination.

Rey stares and stares, thinking of countless crashed ship hulls with their support beams and durasteel panels, and wonders that a building made out of something as crude as raw stone could support a space of this magnitude. It looks old; older than anything she’s seen, which isn’t saying much.

And for all that, she feels deep in her bones that something is _wrong_ here. Off. Something is missing.

“What happened here?” Rey murmurs.

Halfway down the steps, he pauses and looks back at her, following her gaze where it rests on the chandelier.

“They’re gone now,” is his only explanation.

Rey blinks at the _nothing_ in his voice, staring at him with a prickle of unease running down her spine. For the first time, she realizes that she might have cause to be concerned. He looks back, his eyes black coals. This person looking at her feels different to the man in the bedroom, with his scholarly voice and his shock.

Black shadows creep in at the edges of the room, catching her attention in their wrongness. They’re too dark, and they’re _moving._

“Well,” Rey says, keeping her voice steady even as warning bells chime deep in her chest. “It’s certainly grim enough for the king of the dead.”

At this, he almost chuckles, and the sound is normal enough.

“Come.”

A few indistinguishable hallways later and they are sitting before a great, empty hearth, a loaf of bread in one hand that she eats ravenously, her previous anxieties forgotten as she tears into the bread. Her feet, bare against the simple wood stool she sits on, swing slightly, drunk on the bliss contained in this simple meal. At her side, stacks of cast iron pans, tarnished silver dishes, and rusting cauldrons rest in great heaps, loosely organized by category. An enormous sink with a coppery-green faucet drips what she’s fairly certain is water into a ceramic basin.

The room is dark, like the rest of this place, but more of those strips of illumination cast a sterile white light across the floor. It’s a place that would be better served by oil lamps.

“You know,” Rey murmurs, “I think you _could_ go and find them. If you wanted.”

He’s certainly powerful enough. She’s beginning to admit that to herself.

From his position by the empty hearth, he puts a hand in his pocket and says, “Your parents?”

“No,” says Rey around a mouthful of bread. “Your masters. The dead ones.”

“It’s possible,” he says slowly.

“You could get an answer from them.”

“An answer to what?”

“Why they built such a grim castle,” Rey says, curious how he will receive a joke.

“It is a temple of reflection,” Ben says. “It is not built to be pleasing. It is a place for mastering passion.”

“That’s impossible,” she murmurs. “Rest from passion. It’s like suggesting you give up being human.”

Rey sets her bread on the counter, hopping down to pad over to where he is standing stiffly next to the fireplace. On her way, she idly picks up a cast iron frying pan, testing its weight. Heavy. Well made and balanced. His eyes follow her every movement, hungry and a trifle wary.

Coming up to him, she hesitates for a minute on the balls of her feet, looking up at him, the frying pan loose in one hand.

 “Are you going to hit me with that frying pan?” he murmurs, bending his head slightly. He smells like old, soft fabric. And something else.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m trying to make a point. Do you mind?”

“Well, go ahead. Try.”

Rey holds his gaze, lifts the pan, and swings the pan up in a wide arc, aiming right for his head.

With one strong arm, he blocks the impact, his fingers wrapping around the handle, crushing her fingers against the metal with truly bruising strength.

For a minute they just hold like that, looking at each other, the iron halfway to his head.

“What point was this meant to demonstrate to me?”

“That you can no more give up your humanity than you could let me strike you in the face with a cast iron skillet. You’re human. Your central drive is to survive.”

He’s just holding her hand there, frozen right at the moment before impact.

“I find that metaphor clumsy,” he murmurs.

“Well, I wasn’t raised in a castle,” Rey mumbles, feeling the brush of his leg against her knee as she applies slight pressure to her arm. He withstands it like it’s nothing, which is infuriating.

“Then allow me to make a point of my own,” he says calmly.

His lips twitch, and then he brings his arm down, taking her hand with it, the frying pan coming between them as he forces her forearm between their two bodies. It doesn’t hurt, but it could. Rey understands this the way she knows that this place is real, but not reality.

His voice is quiet.

“Impulse and desire can be mastered, blocked. With careful effort. And attentiveness.”

“To what end?”

There is much she does not know about the fabric of reality, the nature of death, or the end result of all the violence she has perpetrated in her life. But she understands wanting something, longing for it so long it seems to measure the time passing in her heart. A familiar sluice of longing strikes her now.

It feels like he can read her desire as plain as the stars in the sky, because he says, “Some impulses must be silenced before they become compulsions.”

He lets her hand go at that, and the frying pan is suddenly heavy without him. She lets it hang, loose and harmless now at her side.

“Or you can transform them. Make them something else,” Rey counters, a naked challenge in her voice. Her blood is up. She has food and time, and he has answers that she wants. If she’d been raised like him, perhaps she would go away and compose a sonnet. But she wasn’t, so she doesn’t.

He reaches for another piece of bread, turning his back on her with annoying casualness. It’s like he doesn’t fear her retribution at all. Not a threat. The bread flies through the air towards her, and she catches it one handed, the frying pan an awkward counterweight at her side. Grumpily, she sets her weapon on the counter and tears into the bread as he returns to his monkish position beside the fire.

“You’re talking of bodily desire,” he says flatly.

Rey almost chokes on her bread, coughing loud enough to dissipate any desire he may have been feeling for her. Scowling, she says, “I was talking about violence.”

“Do you fight?”

“With a staff, yes,” Rey says, missing her faithful tool. She’d like to have it here. It might amuse her to poke him with it.

“A melee weapon. Why am I not surprised,” he says. It isn’t a question, rhetorical or otherwise.

Rey just shrugs. “Well, some of us don’t control death and have to get our hands dirty.”

She’s baiting him. She knows she’s baiting him, but it’s a temptation she can’t resist.

“You _are_ itching for a fight, aren’t you?”

“We can trade. A victory for a ticket out.”

“It doesn’t work that way. The way out is to die.”

“And I just, what, stay here until then?”

She watches him swallow, a muscle in his jaw ticking. But he says nothing.

Rey ventures again. “I think there’s another way out. I think it has to do with the Force.”

The word rings in that room, full of energy and promise.

“That,” he says coolly. “Is probably true. Though I’ve no idea how.”

“I can only use the Force under extreme circumstances.”

“Such as?”

“Violence. Hunger,” she says. “Desire.”

“Eat your bread,” he says.

Rey sets her bread on the table, eyeing him up and down. Taking the measure of him. That leashed energy is there, his body remote as an island, but his eyes still burn, and she knows that she has him somehow. Somewhere, he is in the palm of her calloused hand. She’s just not sure if that’s a good thing.

“You have a _lifetime_ for calm. Whereas I am the only house-guest you may ever have,” she points out. “You should make the most of me.”

For a minute he only stares at her, hand on his chin, eyes lidded. By degrees, however, she feels it. A stirring. A riotous, vibrating energy that she cannot see or hear, but that she perceives with some inner, more sensitive organ. It stimulates something in her own chest, a kind of answering force that makes her clench her jaw against the sudden chattering of her teeth. The metal pans rattle in their stacks.

It feels very, _very_ good.

And then he moves, crossing to her with an intent she hadn’t seen in the sad-eyed monk or the startled young man whose bed she’d woken up in. Now, he seems possessed of purpose, valor, strength.

She does not back up, does not let him crowd her against the butcher block dominating the center of the room. Instead she lets him come to her, lets him put one hand on her cheek and tilt her face up to his as the other snakes to her waist. Staring down at her, his eyes glitter, and she has that uncanny feeling from the great hall, when he’d looked at her for a minute and she’d seen the eyes of some other man looking at her.

“Do you know how death got its name?”

His voice is low and murky and soft. Tendrils of darkness snake their way from the edges of the room. Pleasure curls in her belly.

“No,” Rey says.

“They call me the keeper, Rey of Jakku, because I keep things. That is what death is. That is what I am.”

Rey’s fingers at her side itch for a staff, they long to be clawing, tearing, _ripping_ into the soft fabric of his clothes, straight for his heart. But her body, pliant against his, aches in some new, uncomfortable way that is nothing like a sore muscle or a persistent thirst in the back of her throat.

He dips his head, his forehead touching hers, his hands nearly trembling against her cheek. Dark hair, thick and sweet smelling, blocks her in until it is his face alone she sees.

“I keep, and keep, and keep, and yet I cannot _have,_ ” he murmurs. “I cannot hold.”

Her fingers jump at her sides, reaching out as she tilts her head up just slightly to catch his eyes. She estimates she has five seconds until she loses control of herself and bites that lip of his. Time enough.

The frying pan makes contact with his head with a clang like thunder, and he falls to the ground in a slow, laborious heap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEHEEHEHEHEE.
> 
> Side note, but I'd love to have you join me on [my Tumblr](https://violetwilson.tumblr.com/) and [my Twitter](https://twitter.com/ViWiWrites) for fun chats and dumb memes! 
> 
> If you liked this story, I'd really appreciate a kudos and a comment! It's the only way I get paid.


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